@redhenlab™

The Distributed Little Red Hen Lab™ is a global laboratory and consortium for research into multimodal communication. Its main goal is theory. Its second goal is the development of new computational, statistical, and technical tools to assist research on multimodal communication.
See the Overview of the Red Hen Vision and Program.
Red Hen is a cooperative of engaged researchers who collaborate closely and contribute power and content to Red Hen and hence to each other and to future researchers. It lacks the resources and organization to serve scholars other than those who work in the cooperative. Red Hen's vast and growing archive is not designed to be a corpus, but some collaborators use it to help create corpora for specific purposes. Researchers who would like to work on yet newer ways of deriving corpora from the archive, on providing user-friendly interfaces for the archive, on improving the tagging of data, or on anything else that would benefit the distributed laboratory are warmly encouraged to write to the directors.
See Access and our Google Summer of Code 2018 ideas page. See also our Barnyard of Possible Specific Projects—our concrete to-do list. Join us and dig in!

Tools developed or deployed by Red Hen—theoretical, computational, technical, statistical—are meant to help advance research in any study of multimodal communication, including any area in which there are records of human communication:
speech in any language, infant vocalization,

Ancient Near Eastern writing systems, Classical Archaeology, text of any kind, notation systems, audio recordings (radio, interviews, . . .), audiovisual records, architecture, signage, gesture, pose, Greek vase painting, Roman sculpture, representations of co-speech gesture in Medieval paintings, and of course, but not foundationally, modern digital media.
Red Hen focuses on basic mental operations of cognition, affect, creativity, and communication that appear to have been common across our species for at least the last fifty thousand years, and which have been recruited to great effect by various forms of media.
Red Hen finds non-human animal communication interesting, too. Records and methods related to non-human communication or communication between species (e.g., border collies responding to pointing gestures) accordingly fascinate Red Hen.

What Kind of Red Hen Are You? (2016)

Highlights

ICMC2017, Red Hen's International Conference on Multimodal Communication in Germany was held

9-11 June

Why is it called the "Distributed Little Red Hen Lab™"? Because we are a worldwide, networked cooperative of self-reliant, closely-collaborating researchers contributing to each other and to future researchers. The Little Red Hen is an industrious character in a folktale, always open to collaboration but able, willing, and proud to do any job herself, and in good time. We have named our lab in her honor. The very first Donald Duck cartoon (1934) is an adaptation of this folk tale; there is also a 1956 Russian version.

The Distributed Little Red Hen Lab™, also known as "Red Hen Lab™" or "Red Hen," utilizes high-performance computing clusters and sophisticated videoconferencing capacities provided by Case Western Reserve University. We are grateful to Information Technology Services at Case Western Reserve University for providing these resources. Principal nodes of the research network include